


Out of Luck

by TheWrongKindOfPC



Series: life! life! eternity! [1]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 20:15:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29213283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC
Summary: On the wall near the floor of the back-stage door down to the costume shop underneath the auditorium, someone has carved out in deep, paint-denting ballpoint pen “JONNY D’VILLE EATS LIVE FROGS”
Relationships: Jonny d'Ville & Ashes O'Reilly, Jonny d'Ville & Gunpowder Tim
Series: life! life! eternity! [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2153655
Comments: 24
Kudos: 51





	Out of Luck

**Author's Note:**

> note: this fic is an American high school AU because while the real people in the Mechanisms are British, setting aside the deeply subtextually British thematic motifs of corrupt and crumbling empire which reappear throughout the mechs’ discography, there’s no reason why the fictional aliens they play, who hail from a range of imaginary planets, can’t be reimagined into an adolescent educational environment analogous to my own in order to better facilitate my transformation of them into teenage dirtbags. Also, it’s not like the US doesn’t have its own decaying empire vibes shaped by industrial capitalism to draw on.
> 
> All love & brainstorming credit to A&A — You Know Who You Are and You Know What You’ve Done.

“Who said I did?” an unfortunately familiar voice calls out.

Ashes is hurrying, a little, when they run into Jonny terrorizing a sophomore in the back alley by the cafeteria entrance. 

“I didn’t say I believed it!” the hapless sophomore, who looks vaguely familiar, maybe from one of Marius’s drama productions, wails in that kind of exhausted tone that means he’s probably already said it three or so times. Ashes could have told him that repetition isn’t going to save him — Jonny’s like a dog with a bone when he’s decided he’s offended about something.

“Well, why wouldn’t you believe it?” Jonny asks, tone just as combative as before even though he seems to have switched sides of the argument. “Why wouldn’t I? Who’s more likely to eat live frogs than me?”

This actually sounds interesting enough that Ashes slows to watch. They’ve been late to homeroom often enough this year already, one more time is hardly going to kill them.

The sophomore appears to give this question a little thought before replying, querulously, “Well, it doesn’t seem very nice for the frogs, for one thing.”

“Frogs,” Jonny scoffs. “You’ll eat the caf’s sorry excuse for chicken fingers, but you’ll get all squeamish about eating a frog?”

“Chickens deserve eating,” Ashes offers, figuring they’ve been there long enough without drawing attention to themself. “They’re cannibals, you know.”

“And if we all ate all the cannibals, we’d wipe out the whole human population with prion disease, what is your point, Ashes?” Jonny says, turning on them like they’re the person he’s been arguing with all along.

“I’m a vegetarian, actually?” The sophomore offers weakly.

“Aren’t you about to be late for homeroom?” Ashes asks the kid. They mean it as an offer of an out from whatever mad feedback loop the kid’s gotten locked in with Jonny, but they’re not displeased to hear it come out a little threatening, either.

In either case, the kid takes the out, making a show of looking at a clock and then scuttling off. “No point,” Ashes answers Jonny belatedly, “I just thought it was kind of an interesting idea. You know, punitive carnivorism. Like that food movement that’s all about making invasive species gourmet so that more people will want to eat them.”

As they’re talking, Ashes starts to make their way up the stairs and into the building, and after a moment, Jonny falls into step beside them, which is good because while Ashes is hardly going to go around trying to avoid one, it’s not like they _need_ another detention. “And cannibalism is a devourable offense?” Jonny asks, looking a bit tickled at the thought experiment.

“Definitely more than the inherent crime of being a frog,” Ashes says, sidestepping the issue in part because they’re not entirely sure they’re right about the chicken cannibalism thing, and they’d rather distract Jonny than have to check their sources. “What was that about, anyway?”

“No clue,” Jonny answers, sighing gustily and then slumping to shove his hands into the pockets of his droopy trench-coat. “That fetus just came up to me and asked if it was true that I ate live frogs.”

“And what did you say?” Ashes asks, idly mentally debating whether to bother stopping off at their locker to dump some books or just grit their teeth carry them all around all day.

“I said ‘Why the fuck are you asking me that?’ what do you _think_?”

“You could have just said no,” Ashes offers, although they know, in their heart of hearts, that there’s no way _they_ would have outright denied a rumor that wild, either. It’s one of the reasons they get along with Jonny so well. Sometimes Ashes isn’t even sure if they like him, or if he likes them back, they just both enjoy the effect of the combined power of their reputations and aesthetics too much not to be friends.

“It’s not that I mind, so much,” Jonny muses, voice dropping a little as they turn onto C corridor and it becomes clear from the closed classroom doors and the droning sound of voices behind them that homeroom has, in fact, already started without them, “I just wonder where it’s coming from. The _frogs_ of it all, you know? Seems a bit random.”

Ashes just shrugs, peeling away from Jonny a few doors before his homeroom to lurk in the corridor outside of their own, trying to catch a glimpse in the window of the classroom door. If they time it _just right_ they can slip in the door just when Mrs. Engledew’s back is turned. “No idea,” they tell Jonny absently.

…

Marius knows, though.

“It’s illegal, isn’t it?” he offers. “Eating live frogs. At least in California, I swear I read that somewhere.”

“So it’s your fault,” Jonny intones in one of those deep, crackly fake voices that have inspired Marius’s drama instructor to ask him to try out for the school play more than once.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Marius replies airily, but the unsubtle way he tries to edge just a little of the way behind Ivy gives away they lie. For someone who spends so little of the time trying to tell the truth, Ashes reflects, Marius really isn’t very good at lying.

“It’s alright,” Jonny says, lapsing back into his more everyday voice. “I’ll let you live this time. But I am telling Dr. Carmilla on you if I get some kind of wasting disease from eating a frog.”

Only a few of them have this lunch period — Nastya and Brian and Raphaella and the Toy Soldier all have second lunch, and Tim has those anger meetings with his counselor during lunch on Wednesdays, so there aren’t many people here to question that statement aside from Ashes themself, and _they’re_ certainly not going to give Jonny the satisfaction of sounding curious, but after a moment, Ivy obligingly asks for them, “You’re not actually going to do it, are you?”

She actually looks up from her book to do it, which is rare enough that Jonny seems to take the question seriously. He says “Well now I’ve got a reputation to live up to, _apparently_. Wouldn’t want to disappoint my adoring public.”

Ashes flicks him on the forehead. “Nobody cares that much about what you do, Jonathan.” Ashes doesn’t especially think that eating a live frog could be very good for a person, even a person like Jonny, who has eaten a whole lot of things on a dare that the human body probably has some trouble thriving on. There are all those bones, for one thing.

“Actually,” Marius says, “A lot of the theater kids care, it’s why I—I mean, I bet it’s why someone would start a rumor about him.”

That’s …interesting, as far as it goes. Before today, Ashes would have said that, of the two of them, _they_ had a more impressive reputation than Jonny, at least since after that thing with the fire department. Not that Ashes wants Marius stirring shit up for them with the theater geeks, or anything. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that Ashes doesn’t think Jonny should start going around swallowing frogs whole. There’s a reason Tim’s counselor got so weird about the kittens, and that reason is that violence is one thing, but when you get into cruelty to animals there are _implications_ , and they’re implications that Ashes doesn’t think any of them need attached to any official records.

(Not that Tim’s cruel to the kittens — if anything, he’s shockingly gentle, the opposite end of the scale from the violence, and just as different from the kid he was back before the whole Bertie thing, when Ashes and the others didn’t really know him yet, but in the other direction.)

“ _Don’t_ encourage him,” Ashes tells Marius, and they use their best glare for emphasis. Marius doesn’t cower — he can be annoyingly impervious to intimidation when he wants to be — but he does drop the subject, reaching behind him to gather up the cheap-shiny body of one of the school’s practice guitars he must have sniped from the band room on his way to lunch. Marius has this way of manifesting instruments around him wherever he goes, it would be impressive if it weren’t so irritating. “Nothing cheerful,” Ashes warns him, glaring. 

“Sure,” Marius agrees, his _tone_ cheerful enough to make Ashes worry that he hasn’t taken them seriously. Sometimes Ashes misses the days when he and Raph were tiny freshmen who were terrified of them. “I’ve got Algebra after lunch, so I’m in mourning for my lost youth.”

…

Detention lengths are, like, _kind_ of standardized but not _very_ standardized, which means that while Ashes is definitely not the only one stuck in the building after school for a length of time not entirely within their control, they’re the only one whose time is at the discretion of Engledew, who doesn’t like to let anything slide, and so by the time Ashes finally makes their way outside the building, the parking lot out behind the school is nearly empty and Nastya is leaning on the Aurora’s horn.

Jonny leans out the passenger-side window, hands clamped over his ears, and yells, “Get your ass over here, O’Reilly,” but Ashes just stares him down and deliberately slows their pace to an insouciant saunter as they make their way across the cracked pavement.

Through the windshield, Ashes can see Nastya quirk up one eyebrow, pull her hand off the horn for a second, and then honk it down again in two long, aggressive beeps, and _that_ is enough to speed their pace up a little. Their extended staring contest with Jonny in all subjects and mediums isn’t worth the trouble of pissing Nastya off, maybe enough that she won’t let herself be talked into making a stop at that one smoke shop by the interstate that usually doesn’t card so Ashes can stock up on cigars. They can usually keep themselves well-enough supplied in cigarettes through the school’s black market and snaking the occasional pack from their stepmother’s purse, but the cigars can be tricky, which is unfortunate because Ashes has decided that they want cigars to be their _thing_. There’s something sleazy-appealing about cigars, they always make Ashes feel like a crime boss.

“Keep your shirt on,” Ashes grumbles as they get within range of the van. “Ivy can’t be here yet anyway, can she?” Ivy never leaves the library until it officially closes or Ashes drags her down before she misses her ride.

In response, a glitter-nailpolished hand snakes around to the open window by Jonny’s head from the back seat to flip Ashes off. “I stand corrected,” Ashes says, reaching for the handle to the backseat door of the Aurora and giving it a wrench. The door always sticks, but it’s a point of pride, for Ashes, not to need help or to have to try it more than once to pop it open. When the latch un-catches and the door springs free, Ashes stops on the doorstep, staring into the van, nonplussed. It certainly is a full house today.

Tim’s claimed one of the bucket seats, which is fair enough because he’s somehow managed to get through both the full school-day and his counseling session with his trench coat pockets full of kittens without anyone noticing or sending him home. He doesn’t usually do that anymore, now that the kittens are bigger and Tim seems to be, at least on the surface, a little bit less fucked up than he used to be, but Tim’s _thing_ is pretty unpredictable, so what does Ashes know? If the kittens make him less likely to get into fights in the hallway between classes, Ashes thinks the administration should probably appreciate that for the reprieve that it is, rather than a the conduct violation they usually count it as. 

Ivy’s in the other bucket seat, both a book and a kitten in her lap, eyes fixed on the book and only very absently acknowledging the kitten, which she gently pushes back each time it tries to walk across the pages. And Brian, the Toy Solider, and Raph are all squished into the back bench seat already. “No Marius?” Ashes asks, half-joking half-serious. 

It’s a joke because the clown-car shenanigans that come when they try to cram the full set of them into the Aurora are pretty hilarious, but also somewhat genuine — Marius and Raphaella are usually a pretty matched set, from the moment they first attached themselves to the group as wide-eyed freshmen fascinated by the most morbid group of sophomores they could find. “He’s got rehearsal,” Raph says, shrugging.

“You sure he didn’t just say that when he saw the kittens in the car?” Ashes asks. They’re not a huge fan of the kittens themselves, honestly — they have a mild respiratory allergy to them, if they’re being perfectly honest — but the way Marius is terrified of them will never not be funny.

“Can we get going?” Nastya asks, cutting through the bullshit. She’s good at that, but then, Ashes reflects, one of them’s got to be, and the rest of them are much better at producing bullshit than clearing it. “I am not taking us out to the mall unless we can get going before rush hour.”

Ashes peers into the back seat. “Okay, well someone’s got to shove over.” They’re not sure if someone’s going to object — Brian can be a bit of a rule-follower about seatbelt limits when he’s in a certain mood, and Tim’s got more _reason_ than most of them to object to bending traffic laws but he’s honestly more likely to channel it into self-destruction than caution — but the Toy Soldier just obligingly shifts into Raph’s lap to make room, which in any case puts them right behind Tim’s seat, all the better to mess with his hair. Ashes shrugs and climbs into the van, squeezing in between Brian and the mass of limbs that is Raph and the Toy Soldier.

From the front, Nastya warns, “I swear to god, Tim, if one of those cats gets anywhere near the pedals I am pulling this van over and letting all three of you out to find your own way home, I don’t care if we’re on a four-lane highway.”

Tim nods and hands the kitten which has been bothering Ivy back to Raph to hold around the Toy Soldier in her lap, and then they’re off.

…

“You could let me dye it,” Raph nags at Tim, not for the first time. Ashes feels like Raphaella’s complete lack of wariness at Tim’s whole _thing_ is, yes, probably largely a general Raph-feels-no-fear thing, but also probably slightly a thing where she feels comfortable poking at Tim the same way she feels comfortable with Ashes themself, with Jonny, with Nastya, and with Brian and the Toy Soldier; to Raph, they’re all the same level of slightly older with kind of messed up reputations. But the thing is that Jonny talks about violence a lot, but he likes talking about it more than he likes committing it. He’s been in the principal’s office for fighting too — as has the Toy Soldier, and Brian too, for that matter, when he was in one of his retributive justice phases last year — but those have always been more of posturing scuffles than real attempts to do damage.

“Nope,” Tim says breezily, dangling a loose thread still attached to the sleeve of his coat for one of the kittens to attack and ducking out of the way of where Raph has Ivy’s new tub of Manic Panic held up near his ear in illustration for the toy soldier, who she asks, “Wouldn’t he look just smashing in violet?”

That’s dirty pool, Ashes thinks — a leading question guided by the fact that it used one of the soldier’s favorite pet phrases, and it’s a bit of manipulation that wasn’t even needed, since it was always a forgone conclusion that the soldier would nod enthusiastically and agree, “Marvelous!”

Tim knows it, too — you can tell by the sure little smile on his face when he asks the soldier, “Does that mean you don’t like my hair now?”

“‘Course not,” the soldier assures him. “It’s capital, capital!”

That’s pretty much what the soldier would have said no matter what Tim looked like, but in this case, Ashes is inclined to agree. Tim’s been growing his hair out since he got kicked out of JROTC after that fight last year, and by this point, he’s got a pretty impressive mane of loose, thick, wispy curls. Ashes has all kinds of respect for Ivy and her commitment to technicolor, which requires more time, money, and effort than Ashes usually wants to put into a look unless it’s for a very special occasion, but they also think there’s plenty of drama in a more natural aesthetic.

“Am I not enough for you, Raph?” Ivy finally asks, blinking her way out of the book in her lap like she’s only just waking up. “Getting bored with my luscious locks?”

That’s closer to a joke than Ivy normally gets, but Nastya really only drove the whole pile of them to Hot Topic because Ivy needed hair dye, and she seems to be in a pretty good mood about it. “Never!” Raph chirps, leaning far too far into Ashes’ space to reach Ivy in the bucket seat in front of them and give her fading crimson hair a friendly pat. “I just think I’ve really got the hang of your hair, so now I want to broaden my horizons.”

From up front, Nastya interrupts to ask where she’s dropping them all, “Because, remember, Doc said if we got hair-dye stains in her bathtub again she’d pickle our livers and keep them in a jar.”

“I still think we should test it, hold her to it,” is Jonny’s contribution, and “Get your feet off my dashboard,” is Nastya’s only reply, but Raph offers up Marius’s place for hair dyeing adventures because he has his own bathroom. 

“It’ll be ages before anyone notices any stains,” she offers airily, and “I’m sure he’ll be nearly done rehearsal by now if we swing by to pick him up.”

“Good,” Jonny says, and then, “I’ve still got a bone to pick with him about that whole frog business,” and then, over Ivy’s almost-audible eye-rolling, he launches into a description of the conversation with that sophomore this morning. 

Raph is able to confirm Marius as the culprit — “But don’t tell him I told you!” — but isn’t, to Ashes’ chagrin, able to explain why Marius is trying to build a sophomore drama nerd cult of personality around _Jonny_ , of all people.

“After all I’ve done for him,” Ashes laments with a tragic little head shake. They spent at _least_ twenty minutes giving him that eyeliner tutorial over the summer. The look definitely works for Marius, who already sort of had anime eyes before Ashes got in there with a M.A.C. eyeliner pencil. Ashes thinks they deserve at least some modicum of loyalty for that.

“You …wish he was starting rumors about you?” Raph puzzles out.

Nastya snorts, but it’s Ivy who answers, absently, “Ashes has always wanted to be a cult figure, but they’re no good at attracting followers.”

Ashes kicks the back of her seat, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

Marius is, in fact, just about done rehearsal by the time they pull the van back into the school parking lot, and mostly fine with the entire horde of them descending on his home with them, although he hesitates in the van doorway when he sees that Tim’s got the kittens with them. “I can’t really have pets in the house,” he says apologetically, but the look he’s giving the kitten on Tim’s lap is definitely one of wariness and respect.

“So you’ll banish the octokittens, but you’ll let Ashes in?” Jonny asks, and he’s definitely spoiling for a fight, and probably has been at least since lunch. 

Ashes would sit back and enjoy the show like the rest of them, except that they don’t enjoy being dragged into the middle unless they’ve chosen to put themself there. Also, “Oi! I do not shed!” they object, vaguely lobbing a balled-up receipt rolling around on the floor of the Aurora at Jonny’s head.

Jonny turns his head to stare them down in the back seat and says, “I’m just saying! That you’re definitely going to try to get your shiny new cigar smoke into the air! Which will definitely be a great combination with the smell of hair dye!”

Ashes reflects a moment on that, then offers, “I’ll lean out the window.”

And somehow, that’s that. Marius heads into the kitchen when they reach the house to distract his mother while Tim hurries the kittens up the stairs; the Toy Soldier follows Marius into the kitchen to burble cheerfully at his mother about the specific unbelievabilities of the action sequences in _The Legend of Zorro_ until Jonny drags them up the stairs; Ashes smokes a cigarillo out the third story window of Marius’s room; and Ivy goes Violent Violet.

Raphaella dip dyes her tips, too, partially to test how well it’ll take in her hair without bleach and partially because, well, the dye is already _there_. She also dyes her palms and haphazard patches of skin all the way up to her elbows because she doesn’t like how claustrophobic the gloves make her hands feel, and Ashes almost falls out the window laughing.

After all of that, there’s still a little dye left, and Raph starts to look speculatively at the kittens, one of which has a white patch on its chest, and the other of which is yellow and orange striped — light enough, Ashes can see Raphaella thinking, that the dye might well show up in its fur without bleach, too.

Tim must see Raph looking, too, because he scoops the orange kitten protectively against his chest, then looks around for the patchy one, which seems to have reached a truce with Ivy and is now asleep in the hood of her sweatshirt. 

“Well, it looks like it’s their bedtime,” Tim says, gesturing at the kittens and moving to put his trench coat back on.

…

One night last summer, Jonny tried to kiss Tim.

Ashes could have told him it wasn’t going to go well. Tim was still pretty fucked up back then — well, Tim is still pretty fucked up _now_ , probably, but _then_ was after that whole thing with Bertie, and that kid Tim beat up about it, and the trial about all of _that_ but before Tim found those kittens and started spending a little less time looking for something to fight, which meant that picking _then_ as a time to try to make a move was probably, Ashes thought, a case of Jonny trying to get hit.

Jonny tries to get hit kind of a lot, to be fair to him. “I’ve just got one of those faces people want to punch,” he says sometimes, but Ashes doesn’t think that’s it, really. It’s more, they think, that Jonny has the most fun when he’s pissing people off, and that he doesn’t see the point of life if he’s not having fun.

In any case, if he was trying to provoke a violent reaction when he tried to mack on their most violently traumatized new acquaintance, he didn’t succeed — if anything, the kiss stopped the argument that was already in progress in its tracks.

That had been just after Bertie, when Tim had still been near-silent and clean-cut looking, and he’d just hung around, and hung around, and he must have liked their group well enough, or better than he liked anyone else who was still alive, or he wouldn’t have kept coming back, but back then he never said enough that you’d know it if you couldn’t read the context clues. Ashes thinks back then maybe he liked them _for_ the morbidity, the dark humor, so probably he wouldn’t have been there to begin with, if they’d tried to be all _sensitive_ , or whatever, but for some reason, that night, one of Jonny’s jokes about teenage death statistics hadn’t landed, and Tim hadn’t found it very funny.

That had probably been the moment, more than any of the scuffles Ashes has actually seen Tim take part in, before and since, which had comes the closest to scaring them. Tim had stood there, toe to toe with Jonny and staring him down with those blank, dead eyes, and Ashes could see, in their mind, how Jonny must have thought it would go. He’d kiss this furious, broken person on his furious, broken mouth, and Tim would live up to the promise of violence in his eyes at that moment and belt Jonny one, and the they would kiss again, this time with blood in their teeth, and it would be slick and cinematic and awful and great.

Instead, Tim had just stepped back, and then stepped back again, and again, until he’d finally turned tail and run. No one else said anything. Nastya fed a few twigs into the fire, and then finally, into the silence, a moment later, Ashes had offered, “I can hit you in the face, if you like?”

It had turned out that Jonny didn’t like, or that, anyway, knowing it was coming took the fun out of it, and the next day Tim had showed up again by the train tracks like nothing had happened, still quiet and withdrawn but not any more distant than he had been before. A few weeks later, they’d found the kittens, and then _that_ whole thing had happened, and these days Ashes never really thinks about that night except for when Tim is weird and soft with the kittens, which has been happening a lot, lately.

He leaves them home for school the next day, however, which is probably for the best since they’re supposed to stay after school to watch Marius in some improv thing, and Ashes doesn’t like their chances of recapturing the octokittens mid-performance if they get loose in the auditorium.

“I’m not sure I should go, really,” Jonny says, leaning back against a pillar in the gray morning air and blowing out an irritating smoke ring.

“Fuck off, if the rest of us have to watch squinty little teenagers do self-conscious improv, then so do you,” Ashes tells him, thinking as they do so that they probably shouldn’t have dignified nonsense like that with a response.

“Well, I wouldn’t like to cause a panic,” Jonny says airily, and Ashes casts their gaze sideways to the mouth of the alley to be sure to telegraph how much they don’t care about whatever almost-certainly-self-indulgent point he’s making. “Wouldn’t want the poor, innocent improv-ers looking down from the stage, noticing me, and then worrying for the lives of their pet frogs.”

“You really are wringing as much mileage out of that one as you can, aren’t you?” Ashes asks, and despite themself, there’s something just a little admiring in their tone. It’s hard not to enjoy, just a little, Jonny’s sheer, bloody-minded adherence to a bit. “You’re not getting out of it that easy.”

Aside from the Toy Soldier, who does JROTC partially because they’re not allowed not to and partially as a fashion statement, and Ivy’s library aide gig, Marius is really the only one of them who does extracurriculars. This means that he’s the one of them who tends to have the most friends outside of their little group, and the thing which Ashes has noticed about _that_ is that, with the general public, Marius, who is probably the cuddliest member of their little crew, tends to play up how dangerous he is for hanging out with the rest of them. This is mildly-to-moderately annoying, but that doesn’t mean that Ashes wants to screw it up for him. He’s alright, Marius. He keeps things interesting. Ashes can do him the solid of showing up and glowering at nerds in fedoras for a performance or six per year. Even if Marius _has_ decided that Jonny is the more sensational one of them to be spreading rumors about. And Jonny can show up, too, goddamn it.

Thursdays Nastya has her half-day of vocational training in the auto shop, so none of them have a ride to anywhere else between the end of the school day and the beginning of Marius’s thing. That’s okay, though — Ivy has the keys to the storage room in the back of the library which has a window that opens out onto a little roof-overhang, so once enough of the librarians have gone home for the day that no one’s going to come out and yell at them about the liability risk, they crawl out onto the roof and lie out in the sun to wait for the performance. Brian’s got a ukulele, and Ashes has a modicum more patience in their heart for Brian’s spontaneously melodic bullshit than they do for Marius’s, and all in all, it’s not a bad few hours they spend killing time before it’s time for Marius’s show.

…

The first problem with the improv show is that it’s meant to be at least mildly participatory, which can be a scourge on all but the most world-class of comedy shows. The second, and much bigger, problem is that Ashes is forced to deal with seeing _Jonny_ proved _right_.

The trouble starts right away when the one of the nerds who’s wearing a porkpie hat asks the audience for an animal, as a prompt to get them going. Jonny, the bastard, shouts “Chicken fingers,” and when Porkpie Hat startles and drops his cue cards, Ashes recognizes him as the sophomore from the alley the other morning. To their credit, the actors, including Marius, do their best with the prompt, and when their MC requests another animal to add into the list, and Jonny calls out “Frogs” at least louder, if not actually sooner, than anyone else, they do their best to genuinely use that prompt to create a scene, too.

They’re obviously shaken, though — mostly Marius and the MC, but the rest of the cast, too, whether because they feel implicated or just because they’re used to taking some of their confidence from the ensemble Ashes isn’t sure. What they _do_ know is that they’re not surprised when Jonny pushes his way to the front of their group as they cluster up to the front of the stage with the rest of the audience to congratulate the performers at the end of the show.

Ashes shoves their way to up near the front, too, and gets there just in time to hear Jonny say, “I want to see it. Now.” He’s got a grin on his face that’s unsettling for how uncharacteristically pleasant it is, and he’s got his fingers folded around Marius’s arm. 

Ashes is also there just in time to see Marius turn on Porkpie and say, “This is _your_ fault.”

“It sounds to _me_ ,” Ashes says, flushed with the awareness that the whole crew, Raph and Ivy and Tim and Brian and the Toy Soldier — everyone but Nastya — is right behind them to see them knowing exactly what’s going on, the only one of them that does, “It sounds to _me_ like it’s both of your faults. C’mon, let’s show the man what he wants to see, Marius.”

Calling Jonny “the man” is probably a little excessive, but the idiom gives Ashes this little thrill of feeling like they’re living in some kind of noir thriller, so they decide to lean into it while they can.

It seems to do the trick, anyway. Marius beckons them all up onstage, then back behind the curtains, and down the stairs to the dressing room, footsteps methodical and resigned as if he’s leading them to his own funeral. When he gets there, he kneels down next to the wall and points. On the wall near the floor of the back-stage door down to the costume shop underneath the auditorium, someone has carved out in deep, paint-denting ballpoint pen _JONNY D’VILLE EATS LIVE FROGS._

“Well, do you?” Ivy asks after a long moment. She doesn’t sound especially impressed with the gravity of the situation.

Jonny swivels his head in her direction and asks, absolute poison in his tone, “Have you ever _seen_ me eat a live frog, Ivy?”

“Well, no,” she says, entirely unfazed, “But I’ve never seen you do a lot of things that I assume you do anyway. Sleep, for example. Shower. Maybe masturbate.”

“Thank you, Ivy,” Jonny says, and that’s one thing Ashes has always thought was fun about Ivy — her complete lack of investment in any of them is great for throwing Jonny off his stride.

And once he’s off his stride, well — that’s when Ashes tends to do some of their best work. “I think you’re giving him a little too much credit, Ivy,” Ashes says, not entirely clear on what their own endgame is meant to be, here, only sure that they feel inspired by it. “I bet you anything Jonny’d never dare eat a live frog. It’d give him, like, frog diseases.”

“I could eat a live frog if I wanted to,” Jonny says, because he is _easy_.

“Oh yeah? Prove it.”

“I don’t know about you, O’Reilly, but I don’t see any frogs here,” Jonny says, casting his eyes around the basement dressing room like a _bastard_ , and oh, Ashes is about to make him pay.

“Sure I don’t think it’s quite humid enough in here to have frogs,” Ashes says, casting their gaze casually up at the mold stains on the ceiling, “But I bet you anything we can find you a roach in the costume shop.”

By the end of the day, Marius’s original ballpoint graffiti has been significantly altered with one of Ivy Alexandria’s blue sharpies. Instead of _JONNY D’VILLE EATS LIVE FROGS_ , it reads, _ASHES O’REILLY FEEDS JONNY D’VILLE LIVE COCKROACHES _.__


End file.
